John shared the story of how he built Powwownow from a start-up to selling it for millions 15 years later. He started the business with 3 others and they all had different yet complementary skills.

No entrepreneur succeeds on their own, we all need to have people around us who support us and do the things we don’t like or are not good at. The right team will help make your business more successful.

There may be lots of people already doing something similar to you but you need to create your own niche so you become THE go to person in that space. Make yourself stand out and don’t be afraid to be different.

We are all a unique combination of the experience, skills and expertise we develop over our years in employment and in business.

What can only you do that is different from your competition?

As John put it “be the only person on the beach selling ice cream.”

Business Lesson 3 – “Email newsletters need to cope with people who don’t do what you want them to do” – Adrian Savage

Ok so you’ve got an email list and you’re adding people and sending emails regularly but are they clicking on the links?

Adrian gave a great example of someone who signs up for your list and hasn’t downloaded your lead magnet (free gift). With Infusionsoft you can target people who haven’t clicked on a link and send them a follow-up email.

A softly, softly approach whereby you say something like “Have you had a chance to download your copy of my report yet? Just in case you haven’t, here’s the link again” and I’d normally add something in that gave them an extra bit of curiosity, such as “don’t miss the tip on page 3 that shows you exactly how to xxxxxxx” or “make sure you watch the part of the video at 3 minutes 20 seconds where I tell you xxxxxxxx”.

Matt shared loads of tips but my favourite one is content underpins the creation of your community.

Rather than building a list, build a community. Make your audience trust and believe in you by giving away awesome free content so there’s no financial transaction. Create content that people enjoy and care about. Your brand needs to be a good fit for them.

Ask your community what they want to know about, use surveys to find out. There’s a great book by Ryan Levesque called “Ask” which explains how and why to do this.

Business Lesson 5 “Online learning is the way forward” – Shaa Wasmund

There’s a revolution in the way we learn nowadays. Rather than sitting in a classroom or reading books we prefer to use the internet. Groupon is the world’s largest vendor of online courses and has a global audience of over 50 million people. Udemy is another popular host.

Online courses are created once and sold multiple times (even whilst you sleep), this is known as “passive” income. Courses cover a wide variety of topics from using Excel, to forensic awareness, cat behaviour and candle making.

Shaa has generated over £500,000 selling online courses via Groupon over the last 12-18 months. She is launching a new course in January 2016 “The Freedom Formula” where you can learn how to create your own courses to sell on Groupon.

Bonus business lesson – “SlideShare” Matt Thomas

Another tip I had to share is from Matt Thomas about SlideShareas it’s owned by LinkedIn and I’ve mentioned it in other blog posts before.

Use SlideShare for reference and research, check out the great talks by industry experts and see what is being said.

Did you attend the bootcamp? What were your favourite business lessons? Please let me know in the comments below.

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